UK Grid joins the Green Grid...

In my previous article, I briefly touched on how the demands of data centres has changed over the last decade and how data centres are now required to deliver higher power racks and more advanced cooling solutions to cope with such energy demands and heat output.

All this adds up to an increased electricity requirement and a greater burden not only on your operating costs but also on the environment.

The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to developing and promoting energy efficiency for data centres and business computing ecosystems by:

• Defining meaningful, user-centric models and metrics
• Promoting the adoption of energy efficient standards, processes, measurement methods and technologies
• Developing standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve performance against the defined metrics

The Green Grid has set out to develop a standard set of measurements to make it easier for an end-user to manage their facilities and thus achieve optimal energy efficiency within data centres around the world. The Green Grid, comprising of peers throughout the data centre and computing industries, seek to unite global industry efforts to standardise and agree on a common set of metrics, processes, methods and new technologies to further its common goal.

Two such matrices are the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data centre infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE). The Green Grid is also developing a third matrix, Data Centre Productivity (DCP).

UK Grid made the decision to join the Green Grid to work with some of the industry leaders in developing the ultimate in energy efficient data centres, thus lowering operating costs and also reducing UK Grid's carbon footprint.

The Green Grid's advice to data centres is to constantly measure your PUE and UK Grid have followed this advice to the letter, enabling our PUE to be reduced from 1.5 to 1.35. UK Grid has a target PUE of 1.2 in some of our newer facilities utilising free-cooling technologies which we will see come online towards the end of 2010.

UK Grid would like to see power consumption reduced in data centres and standardisation to be introduced benchmarking energy efficiency in data centres across the world.

Rob Garbutt
CEO
UK Grid